Hello, and welcome to the Los Angeles Bread Bakers blog! On this blog, we will be chronicling our journey growing wheat in Southern California, discussing the meaning of this endeavor, and explaining both our process and the history behind this important experiment. Look forward to information on California landrace wheat, photographs from planting and—eventually—harvesting, and figures and facts about the project.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Backyard Wheat

Our control crop of Glenn, planted in backyard pots, is finally mature.

A couple of dozen plants were harvested today. Threshing and winnowing by hand yielded more than ten kernels per seed head, for a total of three teaspoons of very fresh wheat berries. Our kernels are a little smaller than the original Glenn seed. Today's reaping is about 20% of our backyard crop.

Having computed the area of the wheat pots to be about one-ten-thousandth of an acre, this represents the equivalent of more than 21 bushels per acre. It does help to not have hungry ground squirrels.

Final accounting at Maggie's Farm finds our last remaining variety, the spelt, now devoured.